Hamilcar- Champion of the Gods - David Guymer

by Warhammer

  She beat her wings, eyes sparkling. The feathers of her neck ruffled against her blued armour, a bass cooing coming from deep in her throat.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. If you’re sure you don’t mind having me for company for a while.’ Freeing one arm from Aeygar’s talons, I pointed weakly towards the now-distant speck of light that marked Ikrit’s passage.

  ‘Follow that lightning.’

  With a joyful shriek, the aetar dipped her wings, and turned away from the Gorkomon.

  ‘So there you have it. You will probably have guessed that we’re some way from the end of this story. But look here… We have talked the fire down to its embers. It is morning and it is time to show the enemy our steel. Live out the day and perhaps I will seek you out again to finish the tale.

  ‘For Hamilcar. For Sigmar. And for the Free City.’

  About the Author

  David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the novel Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

  An extract from Gods & Mortals.

  I stood bestride the algae-coated gabion wall of Nemisuvik, proud as you like, getting battered by the elements of the Ghurite Stormwilds as though I were the amethyst-and-gold figurehead of an implausibly massive sail ship. Saltwater steam and brimstone ash stuck my hair to my face and made my tattoos glisten. A cloak of bearskin clung to my shoulders like a man half drowned as I shook my halberd defiantly at the sky. A skull the size of a chariot dropped out of it, horned and baleful. It screamed with the passage of wind through its gaping eye sockets and mouth, and smacked into the ocean about twenty feet out, dousing its fiery cargo and spraying me with sulphurous brine.

  ‘How do you keep on missing?’ I bellowed across the steaming ocean as the missile sank. ‘What can I do to make it easier? Should I light a fire? Wave a flag?’

  More skulls wailed overhead like comets, invisible but for the daemonic glow of eyes and grins that burned through the occluding mists of the pontoon city. Fire mushroomed in the wet haze.

  ‘You couldn’t hit Azyrheim from the top of the Celestial Stair!’

  Let us just say that we don’t all deal with fear in the same way.

  Artillery.

  Does it invoke the same dread in you that it does in me? Even thinking back on it now I can feel my heart beat faster. No? Let me say it again.

  Artillery.

  It was not war as I had been raised to. I didn’t know my past as fully then as I do now, but any fool could intuit that I had been a simple man. I was a child of the Eternal Winterlands of Azyr. On its frozen battlefields, we hit one another with rocks. If we were feeling spectacularly creative we would throw the rocks. A man there rose and fell by his own stamina and courage. Luck played a part, I suppose, as it always must. But a warrior earned his luck as he did the favour of his gods, with recklessness in battle and wantonness off it. Heroes were not splattered by faceless engineers from a mile away.

  Perhaps dread was too timid a word for what I felt as I watched hellish artillery rain down.

  It was a tension that would not pass. It was the feeling of endlessly filling your mouth with ale, but never being able to swallow – my guts were knotted, my mind galloping wild, and my beard was wet. The instincts I had honed on those simpler battlefields against the axe-throw, the spear-thrust, the frost-sabre cat, were of no use here.

  I drew a deep breath, steadying myself internally.

  ‘What are you, an acolyte of Tzeentch?’ I bawled. ‘No, say what you like about the followers of the Twisting Path but they can aim! Anchor a little nearer next time, and maybe you’ll have half a chance of hitting something.’

  The siege of Nemisuvik was one of the first of its kind in the Realmgate Wars. The reason for that was simple – when Sigmar’s storm broke over the Age of Blood, those of us in the vanguard found precious little left worth defending. That’s what a few hundred years under the dominion of Khorne will do to a place. In later days, it came to be known as the Thousand Day Siege. Whether it really lasted as long as that I never did know. I hadn’t been there for the start. The city’s own siege engines and the wild beasts of the Stormwilds had been enough to hold the foe at bay. It was only when the enemy’s catapults had managed to start hitting the walls from beyond the Nemesians’ range that Sigmar had heard the city’s prayers and cast me down to shore up its defences. It hadn’t quite worked out the way either of us had expected. The enemy never showed any interest in taking the city by strength of arms, intent instead on demolishing it from afar.

  Two months I spent, waiting for that invasion, and in that time I never once laid eyes on my opponent.

  Blackjaw was his name, a bloodreaver of whom I knew surprisingly little. Normally, champions of the Blood God tended towards bombastic displays and strutting about as though they had personally invented war. But Blackjaw was different. He had instead raised himself a daemon fleet and obliterated places like Nemisuvik without ever showing his no-doubt-ugly face.

  It is said that in the underworlds of Shyish there exists a hell for every culture in the Mortal Realms. This one, I was starting to feel, was mine.

  ‘I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater! Do you–’

  Then something hit me from behind. It turned out to be the head of a small, lightly braised fish, but I had wound myself into such a state of tension that I spun around with a roar, my halberd raised.

  Akbu grinned at me from behind a mask of rubbing fat, his dark face hemmed in by a leather helmet and a hugely thick leather coat. He was flicking fish scales from his hands, graciously nodding to his warrior band as they handed him coin.

  ‘What…?’ I forced my arm to relax enough to lower my halberd. Akbu’s expression did not alter in the least.

  ‘I bet that I could make you turn around.’

  ‘You do not bait the Bear-Eater, friend. You are likely to lose an arm.’

  ‘Then I would be the one out of pocket. And your face would be very red, I think.’

  Now, I have fought alongside Stormcast Eternals of every Striking. I have fought with duardin, greenskins, even the undead, but I have never stood on a wall with warriors as cheerfully stoic as the maorai, the professional warrior class of Nemisuvik. Give them a duty that would force them to forsake a meal or cheat them at dice and they would scream and rage as though you had sold their firstborn to a Verminlord. But ask them to stand on a sea wall while the sky falls in, week after week, and no masque of Slaanesh could have ever looked happier. They were irreverent, turned up on the wall as it suited them, and fought in iconoclastic formations based on the skins they wore and the beasts whose horns and fangs made their weapons. They didn’t give these groupings names. They probably would have been bemused by the idea, and in truth they functioned more like fractious extended kin-groups than the Freeguild regiments we know and love today. To me, though, they were the Allopex Knife-Throwers, the Eviscerark Spears, the Razorclam Half-Swords. Their insouciance under pressure almost made me ashamed of my increasingly manic acts of bravado.

  ‘Moha bet five shells that you would fall in,’ said Akbu, conversationally, as another skull screamed over our heads, smashing into the built-up areas of the pontoons in a gout of flame. The maorai craned his neck to pick out a woman with a face like a salted chop and leaning on a pole arm of sharpened coral. ‘You are an imp squid, Moha, always squirting your coin into the ocean. The Castle Lord Hamilcar,’ I had long
given up trying to make the Nemesians say Lord-Castellant, and here Akbu bent stiffly to slap his thigh, ‘he has legs like limpet stalks.’

  I was assuming this was a higher compliment than it sounded.

  I looked back over my shoulder to where the waves crashed against the gabion blocks. Rocks and shells had been stuffed into iron baskets, red with rust and seaweed, built into a perimeter wall on a colossal scale. Kelp fronds and accumulated driftwood bobbed with the waves. It was curiously inviting. I sighed, and for a moment the shrieks of the artillery ships, the crackle of the burning city, the endless jibes of the maorai were all sucked into the lap of the waves.

  I could just hurl myself in and swim out to Blackjaw’s flagship, or die in the attempt. That, at least, would be an end that the Nemesians would speak about for a hundred years.

  Had I been entirely myself then I probably would have done it, too. At the very least I would have loudly made the suggestion, and then laughed it off as the maorai talked me down, but my heart wasn’t in it. For all the soaring bellicosity of my highs, I was as prone to crushing lows from which even Korghos Khul with a ribbon around his neck would struggle to rouse me. These bouts were rare, thank Sigmar, and tended to pass swiftly.

  I could feel one tightening around my skull as we spoke.

  I jumped down from the battlements and onto the walkway. ‘I’m going to get some sleep.’

  That a warrior, even a nominal commander such as myself, should just decide to leave his post for an hour or two struck no one as grounds for complaint. They were maorai. They took orders from no one and did as they pleased.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Akbu. ‘If anything will make Blackjaw properly attack the wall then it will be the sight of your back.’

  I smiled, not entirely faking it. ‘I’d show him my arse if I thought it would help.’

  Akbu and his warrior band burst with sudden laughter, for nothing tickles the outrageously well-wrapped Nemesians like an exposed body part.

  With that, I left them to it. I tried not to feel too bad about it. I was just as capable of being blown to pieces by artillery fire from the pontoons as I was on the gabion-walls.

  To see Nemisuvik now is to see a provincial backstop that the new Age has largely left behind. Caught within the abyssal currents of the Stormwilds, there are few places in existence that are harder to get to or more pointless to fight over. To see it as it was at the outbreak of the Realmgate Wars was to see a city whose isolation had given it licence to prosper. At the time, it was one of the greatest unconquered cities in the realms, rivalled only by Azyrheim, Nulahmia and perhaps a handful of others.

  The city was spread across fifteen blubbery pontoons, each big enough to float several hundred homes. To walk its bridges and ropeways was to meander through the madness of the ocean bestiarist or the taxidermist. You were as likely to be presented with a lurkinarth carcass as a driftwood shack. The gigantic rotunda built from leviadon shells and deepwater beasts towered over those lesser dwellings, encrusted with turrets and minarets of caulked wood, silhouetted by fire. For the first few days after my arrival, there had been screams. Not now. No one screamed any more unless they were actually on fire.

  It really was quite the liberation that Sigmar had brought to Nemisuvik.

  You would be forgiven for thinking that the locals must have resented him, and me by extension, for all of this. But that would be to completely misread the Nemesian character. I was but one Stormcast Eternal in a city of thousands of mortals, but they did not see the thousands of warriors who had not come. They saw it through the lens of their own traditions.

  They saw the one warrior who had.

  I made my way across the interconnecting bridges towards the central pontoon, known as Katuunak to the locals. The buildings there were taller and finer, or at least as tall and fine as you can get when your principal building materials are dead animals and the bits that have fallen off other people’s ships. They had been decorated with shells and nacre, painted with the pigments of the ocean. Several had been destroyed by Blackjaw’s war machines, and the weight imbalance had caused the pontoon to list noticeably. The northern rim rode a good three feet above the water, whereas the southern was submerged, and I had to walk against an incline to reach the rail that surrounded the saltwater lake at Katuunak’s centre. My intention had been to stand and watch the still water for an hour or two before returning to the gabion-wall. The bombardment caused it to tremble like a puddle with the approach of a Dracoth, but I found its stillness otherwise to be soothing.

  I had barely caught a glimpse of the water after crossing from the outer promenade to the inner, when I found myself in the unlikely scene of a riot.

  Now in any other city after so many years under siege, a little rioting would have been entirely expected. But when you consider that the single most exciting day of this war – when the lightning bolt delivering me from Azyr had burned down half of the Igulik pontoon – had been greeted with a sigh and another cup of broth, it was frankly surreal. A scrum had formed, comprising about fifty men and women. The two were largely interchangeable in their thick blubber coats as they pushed against a handful of warriors.

  From where I was standing, it looked as though something had inflamed the folk of Katuunak to such an extent that they were looking to throw themselves into the lake. The pontoon guards were all huge men, and they were holding the crowd back, but more seemed to be turning up to pile on all the time.

  I felt my heart begin to race.

  With hindsight, my first instinct – that Blackjaw had somehow evaded the nets, the sea monsters, the rock armour and ballista boxes to come under the city and land on Katuunak pontoon – was foolish. It was really just wishful thinking on my part. I was spoiling for a fight and would have gladly squared up to Khorne himself if the challenge had been offered. At least I was thinking clearly enough to slide my halberd into its bracket across my backplate before striding into the melee.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ I bellowed.

  Someone stupidly threw a punch at me. I parried it on my wrist, turned it across me, opening up the unwise pugilist’s belly into which I obligingly planted a fist of my own. The man folded over before flying backwards into the scrum like a cannon ball.

  ‘Castle Lord!’ one of the guards cried out over the distant rumble of artillery, fending off three men with his spear held horizontal, an elbow in his face. ‘Help us!’

  ‘No!’ From the hubbub of voices in the crowd.

  ‘Feed Angujakkak!’

  ‘Feed the Grey King!’

  ‘It has been long enough…’

  ‘It is time to strike back…’

  There was more, but something in my mind between ears and brain snapped at the words ‘strike back’.

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  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2019.

  This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Jake Murray.

  Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78030-867-8

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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